A Theory of Early Twentieth-Century Agrarian Politics

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A Theory of Early Twentieth-Century Agrarian Politics Author(s): Anne Kane and Michael Mann Source: Social Science History, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 421-454Published by: Social Science History AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1171390Accessed: 26-07-2015 22:37 UTC

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A Theory of Early Twentieth-Century Agrarian Politics ANNE KANE & MICHAEL MANN

THE PRE-WORLD WAR I PERIOD decisively structured modem class relations in Europe and the United States. Farmers, the largest population group, greatly influenced the development of capitalism and states. Scholars have demonstrated farmers' significance in particular areas (e.g., Blackbourn in Germany and Esping-Andersen in Scandinavia), but there has been little comparative analysis. Farmer politics, and thus modem class relations in general, have been inadequately theorized. Most existing work on agrarian classes has also been economistic, neglecting politics. We fill the gaps by analyzing agrarian politics in the United States, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.

Most stratification theory since Marx has been based on Britain. Table I shows how misleading this body of theory is. In 1911 only 9% of the British labor force was in agriculture. In the other two

Anne Kane is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation examines the formulation of ideology during the Irish Land War. She has previously published "Cultural Analysis in Historical Sociology: The Analytic and Concrete Forms of the Autonomy of Culture" in Sociological Theory (I99I). Michael Mann is professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His major work is Sources of Social Power. Volume I, A History of Power from the Beginning to 1760 A.D., was published in 1987; volume 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, i760-I914, is in press. Social Science History 16:3 (Fall 1992). Copyright I1992 by the Social Science History Association. ccc oi45-5532/92/$I.50.



422 SOCIAL SCIENCE HISTORY

Table I Distribution of national labor forces, by sector, circa 1870 and 19io

Manufacturing, Agriculture mining Services Total

Country Year (%) a (%) (%) (%)

Britain 1871 15 47 38 I00 1911 9 52 40 o IOI

France I866 45 29 27 IOI 1911 41 33 26 I00

Denmark 1870 48 22 13 83b 1911 42 24 30 96

Germany 1871 49 29 22 I00 1910 36 37 27 I00

U.S. 1870 50 25 25 100

190Io 31 32 37 I00 Sweden 1870 61 8 12 81b

1910 46 26 24 96 Austria 1869 65 19 16 I00

190Io 57 24 19 I00 Hungary 1870 70 9 21 I00

1910 64 18 15 97 Russia 1897 59 14 25 98 Sources: Bairoch 1968; for Austria, Kausel 1979: 698; for Germany in 1871, Fischer et al. 1982: 52. a Includes forestry and fishing. b The census figures contain large numbers of "inadequately described" occupa- tions, especially for the early years.

most advanced economies, in Germany and the United States, the manufacturing and mining labor forces were only just overtaking the agricultural. Everywhere except in Britain, agrarians were to alter decisively the outcome of struggles between capital, labor, and the middle class.

Theorists have analyzed economic issues better than political ones and the Third World better than the West. Linz (1976), Paige (1976), Sorokin et al. (1930), Stinchcombe (I96I), and Wolf (1969) concentrated on the economic interests and organizing ca- pacities of classes and sectors and on their responses to the global commercialization of capitalism. Yet class battles were also political. Some resisted taxation and military conscription. Other battles became political as groups sought to capture states-central, re-



Early Twentieth-Century Agrarian Politics 423

gional, and local-to achieve their economic goals. As they did so, states and parties also structured agrarian movements. Previous writers have not theorized politics, treating them as "outside" in- fluences on agrarian groups (ibid.: 290-91; Paige 1976: 43, 47) or adding them as empirical details (Linz 1976). Only Stein Rokkan (1970) seriously theorized political variables. He distinguished two pairs of cleavages dominating the rise of the modem state and of democratic representation: a "national revolution" produced conflict between a centralizing nation-building regime and periph- eral regions and transnational churches favoring decentralization; and an industrial revolution produced a sectoral cleavage between landed and industrial interests and a class cleavage between owners and workers. Later cleavages were superimposed upon, and partly structured by, earlier ones. We differ with Rokkan's view of "class" and "sector," but variations in agrarian politics were indeed determined principally by his two representative struggles, the class- sectoral and the "national," which led agrarian populations toward decisively structuring our modem world.

Economic issues did motivate political action; above all, peasant farmers, subjected to "credit-class" exploitation, demanded reform. Yet economic discontent did not determine political response. The variability of agrarian politics was principally determined by the existing nature of state regimes and the political alliances currently available to peasant farmers. The nature of state regimes turned upon whether class-sectoral and "national" representation were institutionalized or contested, and this depended on the stance of other political groupings: classes, sectors, regions, and churches. In no state were farmers in the political majority; as Table I shows, no class was. They needed allies, but the politics of their potential allies constrained agrarian politics.

We develop our argument in five stages. First, we examine classes and sectors to see what politics might be deduced from their direct material interests. Second, we analyze the impact of the chief economic dynamics of the period, the global commercialization of capitalism, on these interests. Third, we distinguish four general patterns through which state regimes influenced agrarian politics. Fourth, we proceed to a country-by-country survey, show- ing regime forms and political alliances determining variations between agrarian-class politics. Fifth, we conclude in general theoretical terms.




Table 2 Distribution of farms, by size, number of farms, and total area of land held, 1892-1913

Estate Peasant Dwarf- Landless farmers farmers holders laborers

Country No. Area No. Area No. Area No. Area

U.S., 190Io 9.8 33 77 67 13 <I <I <I France, 1892a o.6 29 28 57 32 II 39 3 Sweden, 1913b I.0 13 53 75 46 12 na na (Sweden, 1932) 0.6 11 44 74 41 14 14 I Denmark, 1907c I.o 19 25 71 27 7 47 3 Germany, 1907 0.4 23 23 61 I7 Io 59 6

Westernd O.I 5 22 73 42 21 36 I Eastern 0.6 32 21 56 37 II 41 I

Austria, 1902 e 0.7 42 28 47 48 10 24 I Hungary, I895 f 0.6 44 27 41 19 9 54 6 Croatia-Slavonia,

1895 0.2 26 28 48 27 17 44 9 Russia, 1905g I.0 28 67 66 26 6 6 <I Sources: For the U.S., U.S. Bureau of the Census 19Io; for France, Ministere de l'Agriculture 1897, pt. I: 356-68; pt. 2: 218-33; for Germany as a whole, Hohorst 1975: 74; for western and eastern Germany, Dovring 1965: 463; for Austria, Sandgruber 1978: 123 (numbers) and Eddie 1967: 302 (areas); for Hungary, Tomasevich 1955: 205; for Croatia, Tomasevich 1955: 204; for Sweden, Kuuse 1971: 42; for Sweden in 1932, Jonasson 1938: 30; for Russia, Shanin 1985: Io1 (numbers) and Medvedev 1987: I2; Lyashchenko 1949: 739; Pavlovsky 1930: 111 (areas). Notes: By definition, estate farmers have landholdings of 1oo hectares or more; peasant farmers, 5-loo hectares; dwarfholders, 1-5 hectares; and landless laborers, less than I hectare. The number and area of farms within each category are expressed as percentages of the total number (Ioo) and area (Ioo hectares) of farms. a We calculated the area figures in each category by multiplying the number of farms by their average area, then dividing that figure into the total area of French farmland. bData for southern and central Sweden only. If the northern counties were included, there would be fewer estate and peasant farmers and more dwarfholders. The data for 1932 include all of Sweden. cDanish categories are io9 hectares or more, 9-og9 hectares, 3-9 hectares, and less than 3 hectares. d The data for western and eastern Germany do not include the five easternmost provinces in Prussia, which contained the largest Junker estates and the greatest number of landless laborers. Therefore, the average percentages for western and eastern Germany do not match those given for Germany as a whole. e Austrian figures are for the entire Austrian Reichshalf. fHungarian and Croatian categories are 115 hectares or more, 5.8-115 hectares, 2.8-5.8 hectares, and less than 2.8 hectares. gRussian categories are in dessiatin (I dessiatin equals I.o9 hectares). The area figures are approximations based on numerous recalculations of data found in secondary




Table 2-Continued sources. See Shanin 1985: 93-102 for a critical analysis of sources of Russian landownership data and a discussion of the problems encountered in differentiating Russian rural groups. Most of the peasant farmers' holdings were at the low end of the range, about 5-20 dessiatin (see Pavlovsky 1930: 89).

CLASS AND SECTORAL INTERESTS

Previous writers identify three main agrarian classes: estate farmers, who owned large tracts of land and employed labor on a moderate to large scale; smallholding farm proprietors-"peasants," in continental European terminology-who usually either owned or leased their land and employed the labor of their own household; and landless laborers, who worked for the first class and occasionally for the second. They might be casual, seasonal or permanent, waged or paid in kind, free or bonded. We will follow the fortunes of these three classes, with two caveats. First, tenant farming created intermediate positions. Where tenants possessed secure tenure and legal privileges, they might converge on either the first or the second class (according to the size of their holdings and whether they employed labor); tenants with less security or whose poverty undermined their rights were closer to landless laborers. Second, peasants were heterogeneous; some were richer, market-oriented farmers, while others were subsistence dwarfholders. Most richer peasants hired laborers, perhaps seasonally, from outside their household; poorer dwarfholding peasants hired themselves out, "freely" or on bonded or sharecropping terms, to richer farmers as well as worked their own small plots. Table 2, based on the spotty censuses of the period, gives the best available estimates of the sizes of these classes.

The size of landholding is a crude measure of stratification. It ignores land quality; thus, the poverty of most Russian peasants, occupying poor land, is concealed. So are regional variations within countries. Most French estate farmers were in the north and center, most small peasants in the south. Most landless laborers in Germany were in eastern Prussia (see note d of the table). Table 2 indicates the prosperity and equality among most American farmers but conceals the poverty of southern sharecroppers. The table reveals the familiar division of Europe east and west of the Elbe. In the east-Prussia, Austria, Hungary, Croatia-Slavonia,




and Russia-there were far larger landed estates. Usually under i% of farms there possessed 30% or more of the total land, ensur- ing that the landless or dwarfholders preponderated numerically. West of the Elbe, agriculture was dominated by peasant farmers or dwarfholders.

The politics of two of the classes will not detain us long. That of estate farmers was straightforward. They constituted the core of all European ruling regimes, dominated the American South, and, together with big business, dominated other American regions. Everywhere they organized conservative "parties of order," which defended property relations.

The politics of landless laborers were contradictory but also easy to grasp. They were rural proletarians, employed by large farmers and usually exploited transparently, who suffered low pay, arbitrary authority, and few legal rights. Most socialist parties concentrated their rural efforts among them in the hope that they would react collectively like industrial workers. Yet laborers- who were territorially dispersed, barely literate, under direct em- ployer control, often accommodated in his or her farm, sometimes as bonded servants, and subject to farmer control of local charity, church, magistracy, and government-were also poor at collective organization. Thus, despite being a latent class, landless laborers rarely organized themselves extensively or politically. As Newby (I977) observes, farmer control led more to "deference" than to class consciousness. This applies also to tenant farmers, if their landlords exercised local supervision. Where laborers and tenants had local autonomy, radical politics generally emerged amid absentee landlordism. In our countries, sharecropping predominated only in parts of southeastern France and in some of the western American states, where it did generate radicalism. The rural proletariat was predominantly passive unless landlord controls were removed.

The politics of the peasants are the problem. They are unclear on a priori economic grounds. Peasants had no inherent class opponent in a Marxian sense, since they owned land and controlled the production process. Production exploitation occurred predominantly within the household, under the household head. Dwarfholding, though it gave many peasants the experience of labor exploitation, was not usually a total class identity for them, since they were also property owners.

A Weberian class analysis, based on market rather than pro-




duction struggles, may be more applicable to peasants. Market forces set apart late nineteenth-century peasants as a class and motivated their politics. Weber divided classes into those who buy labor power, those who sell labor power, and those who do neither. He also grouped together producers, who, given similar endow- ments and facing the same market conditions, "have in common a specific causal component of their life chances" (Weber 1978, 2: 927). In this period, most peasants wished to retain their land and control the production process but were compelled to commer- cialize and seek credit-to buy land, machinery, and consumption goods no longer produced at home. Credit is a primary component in Weber's theory: most historical class struggle involved a linear development of credit issues. Struggles over "consumption credit [changed] toward, first, competitive struggles in the commodity market and then toward wage disputes on the labor market" (ibid.: 931). Yet we show here that peasant-class struggles in the twentieth century were still motivated principally by credit and price exploitation-mortgages and foreclosures, crop-lien systems, prices exacted by monopoly corporations-which ranged peasants as a class against the capitalist class.

Marx had also noted French peasants becoming indebted to big capital, threatening proletarianization. But he doubted their ability to organize as a class. Peasants, though similar to each other, were not interdependent. Their mode of production sepa- rated them from each other, rendering them incapable of class organization. We dispute this conclusion (cf. Wolf 1969); peasants organized very effectively.

Whatever their class interests in both Marxian and Weberian senses, agrarians also shared three broad sectoral interests. First, and most important, was their culturally driven interest in control- ling their land and labor, their symbols of independence, even at the cost of material hardship. This profound ideal underlay peasants' economic and political behavior. Second, farmers were territorially dispersed. This weakened class organization among laborers but gave a territorial local-regional basis to peasants' interests, organization, and politics. Third, European (though not Ameri- can) agrarian populations were more "traditional," having older and more institutionalized relations with old regimes and churches than urban-industrial populations had. Rural politics were more concerned-positively or negatively-with old regimes and cleri- calism than industrial politics were.




Sectoralism ranged farmers as producers against urban-industrial consumers. They had an interest in high food prices, urban- industrials in low prices. Sectoral political conflict might emerge over taxes and tariffs. A complete sectoral split might be rare, since farmers were usually not self-sufficient producers; they also consumed agricultural products. Nor did all agrarian markets vary together; when grain producers sought protection, root crop, wine, or dairy producers might seek open markets. Thus, sectoral interests tended to be narrower. Yet agrarians inhabited a different subculture from urban-industrials. If their economic interests did conflict, cultural differences might amplify them.

It is thus difficult to deduce any necessary politics from agrarian classes and sectors, apart from the conservatism of large farmers. The most obvious Marxian class division, between large farmers and landless labor, was difficult to organize. Other conflict lines seem ambiguous. What Rokkan termed land versus industry conflict was actually a mixture of credit-class struggle and sectoral struggle between producers and consumers, which ranged peasants against different opponents.

GLOBAL COMMERCIALIZATION OF AGRICULTURE

With the spread of railways (from the 1840s) and steamships (from the 187os), continental landmasses could be commercially integrated. Population growth and migration to the cities and into industry enormously increased demand for agrarian produce. This development favored those with land and capital to invest. Estate owners and rich peasants enlarged their wealth and landholding at the expense of common lands and poor peasants. In the industrial revolution, most proletarianization occurred in agriculture (Tilly 1979). Landless laborers increased in number, supplying migrants to industry and overseas. Rural industry and handicrafts declined as manufacturing concentrated in towns (as we will see, this happened less in France and Sweden).

But then polarization stopped. In the I860s in France, and in the 1870s or I88os elsewhere, censuses and commissions revealed that peasants were not disappearing as expected. This finding led to the major contemporary analysis of agrarian classes, Kautsky's Agrarian Question (1988 [18991). Kautsky argued that peasant household labor could be exploited more than free labor and so sur-




vived recessions better. Peasant families worked harder and consumed less to keep their land. Their self-exploitation and unwill- ingness to sell their land led Chayanov to proclaim a new "peasant mode of production." Yet Kautsky noted that peasant households were not autonomous productive units; they were entwined with capitalism. The dwarfholder and the dual worker-peasant household performed day labor on larger farms or in industry while raising part of its subsistence (and marketable produce) on its own cottage plot. The small farm also bred migrant and casual laborers and recruits for expanding armies. A symbiosis developed between the peasant household, capitalism, and the military state. Kautsky, an orthodox Marxist, still expected agricultural employment to plummet with industrialization. But he saw that rural polarization was over.

Kautsky's arguments were correct, though understated. There were also positive reasons why peasants flourished.The concentra- tion of landholding had efficiency limits and required investment beyond most landowners' resources. As Weber (I979 [18941) noticed in his thesis, Junker lords were forced to sell part of their land to peasants in order to raise capital to invest in the remainder of their estates. Second, as industry competed for labor, agricultural wages increased. Farm workers could save and invest in smallholdings, and the wage bill of large farmers rose above that of peasants exploiting their households (Grantham 1975). Third, many foodstuffs could be produced as cheaply on small as on large farms. This was less true of grain staples, and therefore of midwestern American farmers, but European peasants could spe- cialize in root crops (as in western Germany [Perkins 1981]), dairy produce (Denmark), or wine (southern France [Smith 19751). Fourth, peasants could form cooperatives to buy machinery and to process and distribute produce. By 19oo most large estate areas- east of the Elbe, in Russia, in southern Italy and Spain, and in the American South-were not advanced economies, as in earlier visions of development, but backward. In advanced regions, large farms, peasants, and landless laborers were interdependent, integrated to industrial and financial sectors.

These conditions fostered two peasant politics: class populism and sectoral alliance. Class populism, rooted in a Weberian class conflict based on credit and market relations, pitted "the people" against corporate capitalism, potentially uniting peasants




and workers in a leftist alliance. As farmers became enmeshed in global capitalism, conflict over credit intensified in all our countries except the most backward, Russia. Borrowing increased on the security of the farmer's land (if a proprietor) or harvest (if a tenant). In U.S. prairie states, farmers mortgaged land to buy shares in railroads, their marketing lifeblood. But collusion between railroad companies and banks brought them losses and the threat of foreclosures. Small farmers borrowed from large ones and from banks; tenants were forced into crop-lien or sharecropping systems. Poorer peasants were the most threatened, especially where partible inheritance fragmented landholdings. Peasants realized that big urban and rural capital exploited them and demanded the cancellation or relief of debts, credit on favorable terms, and the regulation of banks, railroad companies, and corporate suppliers of fertilizer and machinery.

But market competition also intensified sectoral politics. Im- provements a continent away sometimes flooded local markets with cheap goods. Agricultural depressions spread as producers reduced prices. Specialization increased their vulnerability to natu- ral disasters (such as the phylloxera blight that ravaged French vineyards in the late I870s) or to efficient foreign competitors (in the I88os, for example, American farmers improved milling tech- niques to undersell Prussian rye). Farmers could be protected by subsidies, loans, and tariff protection; but tariffs invited foreign retaliation, which harmed producers of other goods, and were usually opposed by the urban-manufacturing sector. Sectoral politics normally pitted peasants and workers against one another; if workers were leftist, agrarians might swing to the right. Much depended on which farmers led sectoral protest. If large farmers did, it might be conservative; if peasants did, it might be populist.

Thus, political economy generated contradictory class and sectoral interests, politicized by debt, credit, and tariff demands and intensified by the great depression from 1873 to the I89os. Many argue that the depression made peasants conservative, opposed to capitalist modernization (e.g., Jenkins 1986). But few peasants opposed capitalist modernization once proletarianization had ebbed. They did not need a great reactionary or revolutionary refusal of capitalism but limited state intervention to relieve their immediate suffering and to enable them to participate in modernization equi- tably. In depressions, intense grievances might be aimed at key capitalist actors, such as banks and railroad companies. But they




implied pragmatic remedies, for example, tariff adjustments and credit and cooperative assistance.

STATE REGIMES AND AGRARIAN POLITICS

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century politics centered on struggles between old regimes and popular movements for citizenship. Seeking to politicize economic grievances, peasant movements were structured by these struggles. As Rokkan observed, struggles were not just between classes and sectors but between centralizers and decentralizers; they also involved church-state conflicts. Rep- resentative movements resisted absolutism in one of two ways: they sought either to reduce central state powers or to accept centralization and democratize it. Thus, representation raised the "national" issue of how centralized the state should be, as well as the class- sectoral issue of who should be represented. In the countryside, churches were the main local-regional mobilizers. Each of the two main churches might be a state church (more likely for Protestant than for Catholic), a majority church, or a minority church. Their views on representation and centralization differed accordingly.

Thus, peasants inserted their grievances into varied state regimes. In our case-study countries, four general patterns became evident by around I9oo:

I. Representation embodying male suffrage and an agreed- on distribution of powers between central and local government might already be largely institutionalized, as in France and the United States. Existing political parties were strong and new peasant parties ineffective; farmers had to channel their demands through the former. Excep- tions are found only in some American states temporarily captured by agrarian parties.

2. Representation might still be contested, ranging a strong, centralized old regime against an equally centralizing "statist," working-class movement. Peasant movements moved rightward, joining old-regime parties or forming right or center-right parties acceptable to the old regime. This was the main pattern in Germany and in the core Austro-German lands of Austria-Hungary.

3. Representation might still be contested, ranging a strong, centralized old regime against decentralizing democratic parties. Peasant politics moved toward class populism.




Where peasants themselves dominated this movement, it was usually a leftist populism; where they did not, it was rightist. This was the pattern across the rest of Austria- Hungary; it was ultimately unsuccessful across southern and western Germany.

4. Representation might still be contested, ranging a weak old regime against an eventually triumphant centralizing democratic movement allying urban liberals, peasants, and workers. Peasants moved leftward to become potential allies of socialists. Where the old regime was toppled peacefully, social democracy resulted, as in Scan- dinavia; where toppling required revolution, peasants and workers alike were forced farther leftward, as in Rus- sia (the now-inadequate state of research on Russia may conceal the presence of decentralizing democratic movements there).'

Pattern I: Institutionalized Democracy and Party Politics-France and the United States

France. France was regionally varied. Its agriculture was both prosperous and backward, multi- and monoculture, worked by noble and bourgeois estates, by peasants, tenant farmers, and impoverished laborers. Industrialization, which shared labor with the peasant household, was slow and dispersed. Though the Revolu- tion had ensured political centralization, its disintegration led to factionalism. Some regions de-Christianized; in others, the church held on. By the I88os a conservative west was divided from a radical southeast, and there were numerous smaller schisms across regions, cities, and countrysides. French politics were local and regional but rarely sectoral. Agrarians were not ranged against industrials.

Most peasants had initially favored the Revolution, since the revolutionaries favored private ownership of property, abolished feudal dues and privileges, and allowed peasants to buy confis- cated lands. But the revolutionaries had ignored the interests of tenants and landless laborers. When the Revolution moved into its war phase, with high taxes, low food prices, and conscription, agrarians backed off, especially in the west. Local landlords and clerics defined local interests, not the emissaries of the state




(Bois I960). The church also provided schools, charity, hospitals, and community recreation. But other regions were touched by the two alternative republican and clerical control networks, by their varied production and credit situations, and by their degree of contact with towns and railways (which spread the Republic's values). Factionalism convulsed towns and rural areas alike (Merriman 1979; Garrier 1973, I: 515-16).

From the 1870s, depression grievances were channeled into varied local-regional movements. The republican southeast em- braced socialism. Peasants and dwarfholders specializing in grapes, other fruits, olives, or flowers were vulnerable to market fluctuations, to overproduction, to competition from large growers (which also lowered dwarfholder wages), and to price and credit squeezes from merchant middlemen (Smith 1975; Judt 1979; Brustein 1988). The loose-knit, predominantly non-Marxian Left adeptly balanced peasant credit-class interests against the production-class interests of sharecroppers and landless laborers. Socialists muted land redistribution, aimed tax relief and subsidies at peasants, instituted progressive taxes, encouraged cooperatives (not collective ownership of land), and attacked mo- nopolies and sometimes, cautiously, the church (Brustein 1988: lo7, 169; Loubere 1974: 206-33). But the Right also learned agility. Beaujolais and Lyonnais notables mobilized peasants and tenants, demanding credit, insurance, and cooperatives to halt the spread of socialism (Garrier 1973, I: 518-22; cf. Berger 1972). The church feared (as did the Catholic Center in Germany) that rural economic discontent might undermine its control. One fac- tion abandoned its monarchism and its landlord allies to embrace "social Christianity."

Thus, French politics were malleable through specific political organizations. This conclusion runs contrary to one interpreta- tion of western versus southeastern regional differences. Brustein (1988) and Judt (1979) argue that they derived from the inherently leftist class interests of peasants, dominant in the southeast, and the inherently rightist class interests of tenants, dominant in the west. Yet we have been unable to read off politics from type of tenancy in other countries. We believe that the rightism of the west owed much to the effective local organizational controls exercised by its landowners and the church, while southeastern leftism owed much to the local organizational autonomy of peasants and their




ability to seize hold of regional republican traditions. In no country did class interests translate directly into leftist or rightist politics.

United States.2 American agricultural commercialization was in full swing by the Civil War. To compete in cash-crop production, farmers needed transport and credit, but they were hit by low agricultural prices and rising debt. The Civil War produced a shortage of currency and credit, high taxes, high custom tariffs (to protect industries), and agricultural distress in the South. After the war, industrialist Republicans dominated the northern states and the federal government, while Democrats held the South. To compete federally, the Democrats also curried favor with business and commerce. Their representation of small-farmer interests became sporadic and of worker interests, negligible. The political moti- vations of agrarian movements, their tendency to generate third parties, and their ultimate defeat are attributable most directly to this unsympathetic two-party regime.

Agrarian distress motivated farmers' political demands. High transport costs motivated calls for railroad regulation, while the high prices of the manufactured goods they used fed their grievances against manufacturers and merchants. Industrial and commercial capitalists were more deeply entrenched in the party system-federally, at the state level, and in most localities-while the banking system also operated against farmers. The restored gold standard was good for business, but farmers got less money for their produce, had to pay more for their purchases, and had to service their debts. A lack of cash forced them to buy on credit. The burden of mortgages grew with their dependence on moneylenders and creditor merchants. A crop-lien system, established in the South after the Civil War, spread among small owners and tenant farmers. Credit-class struggle and sectoral tariff conflict intensified. In America, unlike most of Europe, tariffs protected manufacturers and hurt farmers, particularly in the South and West (Buck 1913: 21).

Since the two parties remained unhelpful, farmers organized autonomously, first in the granger movement of the 1870s, then by supporting independent third parties, like the Reform, Greenback, and Anti-Monopoly parties. The radical Farmers' Alliance of the late I880s attacked tenancy and one-crop dependency and advocated subsidies for cooperatives and farmer exchanges. Along with other agricultural and industrial-labor groups, the alliance created




the People's, or Populist, party. Its rural support was strongest in the South, West, and parts of the Midwest. Its antimonopolist platform demanded greater land security for small farmers, protection from corporations, and a federal "subtreasury" to protect farmers from falling prices and high credit costs. Finally, the early twentieth-century Socialist party drew support from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana farmers forced into tenancy, crop liens, and cotton production. Unlike the Populists exploited by "outside" metropolitan, commercial, and financial interests, southern and southwestern small farmers and tenants suffered at the hands of local, cohesive creditor elites. Thus, cleavage was more obviously class-related than sectoral; it augmented production grievances with credit-class ones and was politically fueled by local elite control of the dominant Democratic party (Rosen 1978). Like their counterparts in France, Scandinavia, and Bavaria, southwestern Socialists advocated moderate agrarian socialism. Going beyond populism to demand the end of monopoly capitalist control of agriculture, they called for cooperative production and land controlled by direct producers, that is, small farmers (Green 1978: 81, 85-86).

These third parties enjoyed much local-regional support and handily won many local and state elections (see Fine 1928; Dyson 1986). Yet, ultimately, all went down to defeat, unable to break through the two-party system in federal elections because of the constituency size and capitalist domination of the two national parties. The farm-labor alliance was necessary for both sides, but having the same opponent rarely generated genuine solidarity between them. Farm-labor parties were successful only in Wisconsin and Minnesota. No common exclusion from political citizenship reinforced compatible, but different, economic programs as in Scandinavia, Russia, or parts of Austria-Hungary.

The Populist party was eventually co-opted by the Democrats. Yet achieving national political office in this way meant diluting agrarian policies. Southwestern agrarian Socialists remained independent but were suppressed by the local Democrats (Green 1978: 382). Even before their suppression, moderate Socialists had run for office with a very diluted program (Burbank 1976: 188). In the South, multiracial populism among small farmers pro- tested the crop-lien system. But the disenfranchisement of blacks split the movement along racial lines. The South remained politi-




cally controlled by local planter-merchant oligarchies until after World War II. Its congressional representatives remained the most cohesive and conservative political bloc in Washington through- out that period, stymieing legislation favoring workers and small farmers. The continuing weakness of American labor also helped condemn radical farmers' movements to futility.

In this period, U.S. farmers' movements achieved little. Later in the twentieth century, after tenant and sharecropper movements collapsed, larger farmers wielded considerable influence through the existing two parties. Many sectoral demands were then realized, but in predominantly conservative forms.

Patterns 2 and 3: Old Regimes, Classes, and "National" Politics in Germany and Austria-Hungary

Germany. German politics had long entwined class, centralization, and religion. In 1871 final unification was achieved by a fairly reactionary, centralizing, and Lutheran Prussian monarchy. Under its semifederal and semirepresentative constitution, the regime's core support came from the army, Lutheran centralizers, noble landlords, and, increasingly, the urban bourgeoisie, who therefore also became national centralizers. Its main enemies were the working class, which was deprived of effective representation, and local-regional minorities favoring decentralization (Poles, Danes, Alsatians, and Hanoverian separatists). Catholics-37% of the population-were more moderate opponents.

Most peasants were in the middle, neither inside the regime nor among the groups defined as "the enemies of the Reich." They enjoyed greater political access than industrial workers, because imbalanced electoral districts favored rural areas. Yet the monarchy, not the parliament, possessed ultimate sovereignty, and effective representation of peasant interests and grievances was not easily achieved. These conditions gave peasants various options. They might gain a voice in mainstream notable parties "inside" the monarchical regime; they might ally themselves with industrial workers; or they might organize their own political movement. Most aligned with mainstream parties and moved to the right. To explain this phenomenon, we must examine agrarian economic conditions, regional and religious political loyalties, and the offer- ings of other parties.




The depression abruptly terminated a period of agrarian prosperity. Suffering varied by region and farm size. The west did better than the south, while large estate owners, especially in eastern Prussia, fared badly. Yet all agrarians were affected by declining prices, debt, and rising production costs. Furthermore, antagonism toward both industrialists and the working class was widespread. Urban dwellers favored low food prices and imported foodstuffs; industry siphoned cheap agricultural labor away from estates and medium peasants employing laborers, along with family workers. Neglected by the regime, peasants harbored a deepening discontent in the 189os. But their responses varied by their stances on the national issue and on urban-industrial struggles, both mediated by region and religion.

East of the Elbe, Junkers controlled politics and prevented other classes from organizing. Protestants in the north, though having no particular interest in repressing industrial workers, favored a centralized nation-state. Catholics, mainly in the southern states, favored confederal decentralization and could be mobilized by their church against both the statist, Protestant old regime and the statist, godless proletariat (Blackbourn 1977, 1984).

The sectoral and credit-class struggles of peasants also influenced their politics in contradictory ways. On the one hand, in- debtedness could generate class populism. After 1882, over half of all German peasants were dwarfholders, forced to hire themselves out as laborers. Military conscription also fell disproportion- ately on them, generating antimilitarism like that of the socialists. Peasants and socialists both opposed the regressive indirect taxes favored by conservatives. On the other hand, if peasant grievances were aired against the land tax and in favor of tariff protection from foreign competition, a sectoral segmental alliance with Junkers and other large farmers would result. Which way would they turn?

The rural fortunes of the northern parties varied. The free- trade Caprivi government (1891-94), disliked by agrarians, had depended on the National Liberal and Progressive parties. Their agrarian wings now declined. Conservative large-farmer parties jumped into the breach, with the Agrarian League (founded in 1893) advocating protection and credit assistance. But in Protes- tant areas, where conservatives had been weak, peasants moved to a rightist populism whose anti-urban, antimonopoly rhetoric became militantly Protestant, nationalist, and anti-Semitic. Jews were an easy target for anticreditor populists in rural Hesse and




Prussia-the same areas where the Social Democratic party (SPD) established a toehold, and the same areas that the Nazis later dominated (Eley 1980; Farr 1986).

Southern peasants, as Catholics, were more independent of the regime, since they favored decentralization (thus initially fitting into pattern 3). The Catholic Center party spearheaded southern demands. Led by urban notables, it was not sympathetic to peasants at first. In the early 189os, the party's free-trade stance began to lose peasant votes. Peasants began to form their own dissident peasant associations and leagues in Westphalia, the Rhineland, and Bavaria. The Bavarian leagues were distinctly radical, anticlerical, and antimilitarist, favoring progressive taxation and agrarian protection. Here was an opening for a leftist alliance with the SPD. But the SPD ignored the peasants, while the alarmed Center party organized to undercut them. It formed its own Catholic peasant associations, moderated its tariff stance, and sponsored agrarian credit programs. The leagues now declined (Farr 1978). The Cen- ter had reasserted its control by transforming itself into a partly peasant party and seeking redress of sectoral grievances. Allied with northern conservatives, it pressured the regime into agrarian protectionism. Southern peasants made some gains through a center party with influence inside the regime.

Thus, German peasants turned predominantly rightward. They tended to adopt the antisocialist, "Christian social" stance of the Catholic Center, or a sectoralism controlled by large-farmer conservatives, or rightist class populism. Agrarian discontent had drifted to the right because of three political causes. First, the authoritarianism of the state regime advantaged top-down divide- and-rule politics. If notable parties responded to rural grievances, as the conservatives and Catholic Center did, their influence within the regime advantaged them over excluded popular parties, and they could bend rural discontent rightward. Second, if notable parties did not respond, autonomous peasant movements emerged, influenced by the national issue and so by religion and region. Northern Protestants favored state centralization: some turned rightward to national populism; a few turned leftward to statist socialism. So began that intense competition between extreme Right and extreme Left in Protestant Germany that eventually helped destroy the Weimar Republic. Ironically, the Catholic confederal south was more fertile ground for a radical agrarian move-




ment; yet the godless, statist SPD was not the best agent for it, and the Center party recovered control. Third, the SPD assisted rightward drift with its Marxian productivist dogma, ignoring the credit-class grievances of peasants and dwarfholders.

Austria-Hungary. Across enormous central and eastern Euro- pean lands, Hapsburg absolutism was confronted by representative movements seeking decentralization. Peasants had little political power. The abolition of serfdom (finalized in 1848) only delivered them more firmly into noble control, especially in Hungary. The dual monarchy was still overwhelmingly rural (see Table I). Agri- culture was dominated by large estates worked by landless laborers or dwarfholders (see Table 2). Peasants could rarely get credit from banks, and they paid steep interest rates to ex-landlords, neighbors, and Jewish moneylenders. Unable to meet credit payments and high regressive taxes, many peasants lost their land to great landholders. Impoverished tenant and landless labor groups swelled, especially in Hungary, where most capitalist development took place on large estates. In parts of Austria where industrialization accelerated, peasants did better.

Production and credit-class struggles, quelled only by tight landlord control in most areas, might be ferocious. Yet peasant politics were also structured in three ways by disputes over democratic and national representation. First, though the monarchy had long fought against democratic representation, it changed tactics late in the century, seeking to divide and rule between classes and the emerging "regional-nations." After experiments with local government assemblies in 1896 and 1907, it conceded male suffrage, though only to assemblies with limited sovereignty (and imple- mentation lagged in Hungary). Before then, urban liberal and rural conservative parties had taken little interest in disenfranchised peasants and landless laborers. The suddenness of enfranchisement produced mass agrarian (and industrial proletarian) parties not already controlled from above, whose principal goal was an extension of parliamentary sovereignty through democratic leftism. Here, unlike in Germany, common political exclusion could unite bourgeois radicals, workers, and peasants.

Second, in the absence of representation, churches had provided the main provincial mobilizing infrastructures and now influenced the emerging mass parties considerably. The Catholic church was a quasi-state church in some provinces, but it was




ultimately transnational, not statist, and in other provinces it expressed local-regional discontent. Minority Protestant churches did so more consistently. Rural movements were anticlerical or clerical according to the stance of the local church, but they were rarely indifferent to religion.

Third, except in the core Austro-German lands, most representative movements favored decentralization (thus fitting into pattern 3). Decentralizers went farther than in other countries, eventually embracing dissident nationalism. This forced the monarchy to de- pend more on Austro-Germans and, after the 1867 compromise, on other client nationalities. Thus landlord-laborer and creditor- debtor relations often also became regional-national, since exploiters were often Germans or client Hungarians or Jews (who were entrenched in state administration and banking), while those exploited were usually of the local nationality. Economic grievances and nationalism reinforced one another. Austro-German democratic movements were more centralist, while non-Germans favored decentralization and eventually national autonomy (see pattern 3). Hungarians were ambivalent, given their position as junior exploiters of the southeastern provinces.

Thus, rural politics varied enormously between regions. In the Austro-German core province of Lower Austria, the parties all favored centralization. They were polarized by class and sectoral grievances emerging from rapid industrialization and urban secu- larization. The conservative, anti-Semitic Christian Social party, Catholic and predominantly peasant, won a two-thirds majority in the Landtag in 1903. It vigorously pursued peasant interests and secured debt moratoriums, mortgage limits, homestead laws, and cooperatives. Its main opponents were the Social Democrats, who garnered some landless laborer votes but virtually no peasant votes. Like their German counterparts, the Social Democrats had little in the way of a rural program and only an unhelpful productivist, statist Marxian dogma (Lewis 1978).

Bohemia was the other main industrializing area. The Czech working class, like its Austro-German comrades, first espoused the statist Marxism of social democracy, but as Czech nationalism spread, the Czech (like the Bavarian) Social Democrats became ambivalent. Moreover, many large farmers were German, and the majority Catholic church was implicated in Habsburg rule, which




made nationalism anticlerical. All this weakened rural resistance to socialism. Bohemia was the area in Europe where Marxist Social Democrats most successfully attracted landless laborers. Indeed, their main competitor was the National Socialist party, which com- bined the ideologies its title suggests (not those of Hitler). Most peasants went to the center-right Agrarian party, which favored Czech autonomy and greater democracy but was antisocialist and indifferent to landless laborers (Pech 1978).

In more backward Slovenia, "national" dissidence was led by the local Catholic church. Most peasants backed the clerical but radical Slovene People's party, committed to democratic reforms and peasant economic interests. The Social Democrats made only a few converts, mostly in ethnically mixed areas where nationalism had little impact. Polish Galicia was also backward and rural, with a history of peasant insurrection and substantial provincial autonomy that allowed Polish nobles and rich peasants to exploit Ruthenian laborers and dwarfholders. Polish nationalism was thus muted, the Catholic church was neutral, and class dominated politics. Catholic and mutualist socialist parties competed for peasant votes and with the Social Democrats for landless laborers.

Hungary's position in the monarchy was unique, with the high- est proportion of large estates and political control by the Magyar nobles institutionalized after 1867 over its Reichshalf. Magyar nationalism was thus muted, and noble control damped down class organization among peasants and laborers (Eddie 1967; Hanak 1975; Macartney 1969: 687-734). Yet agricultural depression caused great suffering, and rural insurrections broke out in 1894 and 1897. The fledgling Hungarian SPD organized some of them but then faded before competition from a radical populist Small- holders' party, which was beginning to compete with landlord parties.

Slovakia and Croatia were Magyar-dominated. First Protes- tant, then Catholic, churches led Slovak national resistance (Pech 1978). Neither had much of an agrarian program. Liberals and socialists were not influential until after World War I. Peasant and landless discontents were ignored by national-religious politics. Croatia produced an almost opposite peasant reaction. Its local notables-a weak nobility, bourgeoisie, and Catholic hierarchy- were clients of Magyar overlords. With notables so compromised,




a powerful dissident nationalism, glorifying the peasant, radical, anticlerical, and even socialist, arose among the excluded 80% peasant majority.

Thus, across Austria-Hungary, class interests (whether production or credit) and sectoral interests rarely led directly to political organization. The national question-essentially a debate over decentralized democracy in a partly confessional state-interposed itself to generate diverse outcomes. Czech national discontent reinforced production-class struggle and produced an alliance of industrial and agrarian proletarians. Where industrialism was advanced and nationalism was uniquely centralist, statist Marxian socialism consolidated industrial workers. But the Austrian Social Democrats were trapped, like their German comrades, into urban- industrial enclaves and into Marxian productivist orthodoxy. Else- where, outcomes were more conservative. Outside Hungary and Slovakia, demands for national autonomy weakened aristocratic and clerical conservatism, but most peasants were steered by nationalism away from radical class populism. Together with the urban bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, they were moving to centrist and rightist populisms that later (allied to anti-Semitism) had some fairly nasty outcomes.

Pattern 4: Weak Old Regimes and Leftist Outcomes-Scandinavia and Russia

Scandinavia. The Scandinavian countries are of special interest for two reasons. First, they eventually (after our time period) developed successful leftist alliances between farmers and urban- industrial socialists. Second, the three countries considered here had varied economies but similar politics: a numerous peasantry was pushed leftward into allying first with liberal bourgeois ele- ments, then with the working class. All had relatively weak landholding nobilities and politically entrenched peasants. After Nor- way achieved independence in 1905, all three countries were also relatively homogeneous, ethnically and religiously, and consensually centralized. Their common destiny seems to have been the product of similar state regimes and political alliances rather than of their economies.

A balance of power had long existed among the Scandinavian states, deterring war, demilitarizing regimes, and so weakening the




normal European solidarity between absolutist monarchs and their nobles. This limited their joint power over peasants. The Swedish estates assembly, the Riksdag, in which richer peasants had a toehold, survived; its powers extended into the nineteenth century. Swedish commercialization began on large estates, then spread among the peasants. The Danish crown had abolished the estates assembly but rescinded serfdom to strengthen peasant freeholders and tenants as a counterweight to nobles. In Denmark, large mano- rial and small peasant farms were commercialized alongside each other. In Norway, subject to foreign rule, there was no indigenous aristocracy, and absolutism was resisted by a broad cross-class alliance. An indebted state was forced to sell its own lands as well as ecclesiastical ones, mainly to peasants. All three countries saw greater peasant political autonomy, national homogeneity, and state centralization (Hovde 1943; Osterud I97I). Two issues, one economic and one political, brought peasants together first with urban liberals, then with workers. First, most small farmers were free traders, "liberals" in the nineteenth- century sense. In Denmark, this was because livestock and dairy farming remained successful in world markets. Danish urban liberals and socialists also favored legal freedoms for tenant crofters, an important semilaborer, semipeasant group. Norwegian peasants favored free trade because it meant internal trade free of foreign-state taxation. Swedish farmers, big and small, were more protectionist. But overall, fewer sectoral conflicts divided agrarians from urban-industrials in Scandinavia than in most of Europe. Swedish and Danish (along with French) industrialization was also distinctive in scattering industry through the countryside rather than concentrating it in urban ghettoes.

Second, peasants allied in mid-nineteenth-century representative struggles with urban liberals (often religious progressives) against weak landed nobilities and monarchies. Then they allied in the twentieth century with workers to achieve social democracy. Politics became tripartite; urban and rural capitalists formed conservative parties, peasants and progressive religious groups formed liberal and radical parties, and workers (manual and white-collar) became Social Democrats. From the 1930s, alliances between the last two groups achieved that uniquely successful form of modem civilization, Scandinavian social democracy (Esping-Andersen 1985; Castles 1978; Duncan 1982; Holmsen 1958; Kuhnle 1975;




Kuuse 1971; Munch 1954; Osterud 1971; Semmingsen 1954; Thomas 1977).3

Russia. Although we have coupled Russia with Scandinavia under a pattern characterized by the toppling of old regimes, in other respects Russia is a deviant case. None of the principal factors of our model-independent peasant proprietors, market- oriented agriculture, states forced to make steady concessions to representative political parties-were present there. We dis- cuss Russia to demonstrate that conventional sociological models of late nineteenth-century agrarian politics-based primarily on Russia-are false. Conventional sociological wisdom (Wolf 1969; Skocpol 1979; Jenkins 1983) argues that Russian peasants were the quintessential revolutionary agrarians of the modem era. We show that they were apolitical agrarians.

Russia was an autocracy, making only very late and rather puny motions toward constitutionalism after 1905. The regime was now opposed principally by urban-industrial and regional-national representative movements. The state seems to have been outside most peasants' reach. At the moment we lack evidence on dissident nationalism within the Russian empire; it may be that peasants from national minorities, like their decentralizing counterparts in other countries, were more politically engaged than we suggest here. But within the Russian core we conventionally delineate dual politics. On the one hand, nobles dominated peasants through the zemstvos, local government units established in 1864, while at the village level the mir, the historical egalitarian commune, still functioned. Most nobles were absentee landowners.

The decades preceding World War I brought agrarian economic change. But peasants remained as they had long been, economically dependent and obligated (for Russian peasants see Haimson 1979a, 1979b; Pavlovsky 1930; Robinson 1969 [1932]; Shanin 1972, 1985; Skocpol 1979; Volin 1960; Wolf 1969). Emancipation from serfdom in 1861 bound peasants to the land in new ways and helped stifle agricultural productivity; in Russia, unlike in Austria- Hungary, it produced few commercial estates. The agricultural depression and declining prices forced nobles to sell or lease land to land-hungry peasants. But peasants had to make emancipation redemption and land payments and pay rents. Rapid regime- sponsored industrialization increased taxes, tariffs, and therefore prices. Peasants were forced to export their produce to pay for




the economy's manufactured imports and foreign loans. Economic pressure depleted herds of oxen and cattle and forced the traditional three-field system to exhaust the poor-quality soil as fields were not left fallow. The mir began to polarize between a few rich peasants (kulaks) and increasing numbers of poor peasants. Most peasants simply had too little fertile land to feed themselves, generate a surplus for the market, and pay state exactions. Their economic condition was desperate, while the autocracy prevented class mobility or reform.

In 1905 the state, beaten in war, suddenly fell apart. Peas- ant insurgence was directed mostly at local landlords and local government. Most rural strikes, attacks on property, and land con- fiscations in 1905 were directed against great landowners. The movement was strongest in the central black-earth region, where tenancy arrangements were most exploitative, and in the few regions where large capitalist farming had displaced peasants. Most consistent support came from middle peasants and from young peasants exposed to revolutionary ideas through work in the cities (Perrie 1972: 141; Wolf 1969). Peasants demanded the redistribution of land and the abolition or reduction of rents, taxes, and service obligations. Many refused to pay taxes. Representatives on local councils, seen as puppets of nobles and the state, were replaced. Violence was sometimes directed against kulaks, but kulaks worked the land they owned; the gentry did not. The peasant ideology "Those that work the land have a right to it" papered over factionalism between peasant strata. Further evidence of the traditional nature of the uprisings is that political agitation from outside was rarely successful and that attacks were often organized by the mir (Walkin 1962; Perrie 1972; Jenkins 1983: 502).

The 1905 revolution was repressed, but the frightened regime set up the Duma parliament, with limited sovereignty and weighted suffrage. Regime and noble landowners now appreciated agriculture's dangerous state. The regime abolished redemption payments; landowners reduced rents and continued to sell off estates. When peasant demands continued in the Duma and through rural violence, however, the regime rescinded most political reforms, depriving peasants of Duma representation, while Stolypin's agrarian reforms attempted to usher in capitalist farming among the richer peasants. The combination of political repression and economic reform temporarily silenced and divided the peasantry.




Communes were factionalized by Stolypin's inducement for peasants to "separate" their title to land from the commune. Rich peasants could do this; the poorest could sell their tiny plots and use the money to migrate to the towns or abroad. The middle- peasant majority, wishing the commune to remain whole, opposed separation. This internal conflict meant that separation rarely consolidated holdings into large private farms. Individual peasant strips remained integrated by the commune, still a powerful source for collective action. Middle peasants favored expropriation of noble and gentry land, and perhaps its nationalization, but they did not want it reorganized on either a capitalist or a Bolshevik collectivist model; the local, decentralized commune remained their ideal. Regime attempts at reform were to worsen the fury unleashed in 1917.

The short-lived Duma representation, then removed and handed over to the ineffectual nobility, deeply affected peasant politics (Haimson 1979a, 1979b; Vinogradoff I979). Peasants were brought into contact with leftist political parties. Common exclusion from citizenship brought popular classes together and turned them leftward, as we have also seen in other countries. Menshe- viks and Bolsheviks were hindered by their orthodox Marxian concern with production relations, but the Social Revolutionary party stressed the more Weberian class issues of income distribution and credit, and their peasant unions, which would play a major role in the 1917 revolution, made considerable inroads. As in 1905, the regime fell apart because of its defeat in war; as in 1905, peasant insurrections were central to the revolutionary process; as in 1905, middle peasants took the lead; and as in 1905, the basis of peasants' unrest was their demand for land.

Thus, Russian peasant movements are explained by their virtual total exclusion, along with workers, from citizenship and by the regime's interference in their economy. Their demands for land and for communal farming were based not on insecurity wrought by the modernizing forces of capitalism, as Wolf and Jenkins main- tain, but on their experience of a state-imposed capitalism that produced no benefits. Unlike every other case-study country, Rus- sia saw little successful capitalist agriculture, even on large estates. In other countries, peasants sought modernization. Russian peasants were not able, nor did they attempt, to integrate themselves into a capitalist economy or democratic state. Most Russian peas-




ant revolts were spontaneous, undirected by political parties or ideologies. Only the Russian peasantry resisted modernization; it simply demanded land, refusing to sever communal bonds, both before and after 1917. Russian peasants wished to remain apolitical, but they were forced by the regime into self-defense through revolution.

CONCLUSION

Among agrarian populations, peasants pose the most problems for political theory, as they did for contemporary politics. They were extraordinarily active and effective in organizing to secure their interests-quite the opposite of Marx's "sack of potatoes." But they were intrinsically neither conservative (as Marx, Moore, Paige, and Stinchcombe argue) nor revolutionary (as Wolf, Bru- stein, and Judt argue). Their economic demands generally implied a moderate reformism that mixed Weberian credit-class struggle, more than Marxian production-class struggle, with sectoral conflict. This mixture resulted as agriculture came under global industrial and finance-capital domination. Since most peasants were proprietors (though often dwarfholders), class conflict in a Marx- ian sense rarely dominated their lives except in southern Europe, where tenancy and sharecropping prevailed and they had room to organize. Yet class struggle, in the Weberian sense of creditor- debtor relations, was endemic and was reinforced by sectoral cleavage, since most creditors were urban capitalists. Peasant demands were predominantly reformist rather than revolutionary, since they sought specific government interventions to mitigate hardships caused by unregulated international markets dominated by big commercial capital. Peasants outside Russia made similar demands, usually for higher tariffs, always for reduced costs of credit, for transport and manufactured goods, for equitable access to land, and for protection of small proprietorship.

Yet peasant movements spanned the whole political spectrum from right to left. The principal determinants of this variation were not usually located in agrarian economic relations, as most ana- lysts contend. True, economic variations could be important, as in France and Scandinavia. But the main determinants were political-the nature of state regimes and the alliances peasants made to gain citizenship. Specific peasant politics emanated primarily from




the insertion of peasants into different classes and from "national" struggles for citizenship that constituted the central politics of the period.

These struggles caught up peasants and landless laborers in the two great class struggles of urban-industrial politics: bourgeois lib- eralism versus landed, old-regime conservatism, then labor versus capital. But only Rokkan correctly perceived that these struggles also revolved around how "national" and centralized the state should be. The more democratic countries had been able to largely settle their national issue; France and the Scandinavian countries were consensually centralized, and the U.S. (with the exception of the South) was consensually federal. But where representation was still the political issue, centralization and decentralization remained in opposition-across Austria, in Germany, and in Russia (for which we unfortunately lack much evidence). Since agrarians were territorially and locally oriented, they usually supported decentralizing local-regional democratic movements, especially if led by nonstate churches. The centrality of religion in rural politics has been widely acknowledged; religious beliefs were often important in political ideologies, and churches provided considerable rural organization. Rokkan argued that peasant parties arose only in Protestant countries, whereas in Catholic countries peasants tended to join broader Catholic parties. There is something in this, though among our cases France and Slovakia are exceptions. We have emphasized the antinational stance of most Catholic and of minority Protestant churches. They and rural populations shared common interests in increasing their political representation by securing a relatively decentralized state. In this way, the politics of religion and region (of "nation" in Austria and probably Russia) were so often and so closely connected that they often subsumed and politically structured peasant interests arising from the global commercialization of agriculture.

In this context, peasants made various electoral alliances with four main class-sectoral movements: urban liberals, old-regime conservatives, capital, and labor. Peasants were seldom a political majority anywhere (and where they were, their power was lessened by restrictions on enfranchisement and parliamentary sovereignty), so they needed one or more allies. As we have demonstrated, they made opportunistic alliances with all four movements.




Why did peasants choose one alliance over another? Weberian credit-class and sectoral interests specified overlapping opponents and constrained potential allies. Industrial labor was a potential, though problematic, ally. Though both farmers and labor viewed corporate capital as their opponent, peasant demands were rarely those of urban-industrial labor movements, except for egalitarian taxation and conscription demands. Sometimes their demands- for tariffs, reduced land taxes, and higher prices for agricultural products, among other things-conflicted with those of labor. More often, they were just different. Organizing peasant-labor alliances was difficult.

Urban-industrial movements of the Right and Left often lost peasant support by ignoring the specificity of their demands. Con- servatives mistakenly counted on "traditional" rural controls to give them peasant support, but these controls were fragile. Peasant proprietors were too economically pragmatic to remain politically traditional unless they benefited from it. Leftist parties were generally worse offenders. Through all this complexity, it is evident that rural politics did not turn out as leftist as they might. There might have been more worker-peasant alliances. This was to have profound consequences for later twentieth-century politics, which sometimes turned catastrophically to the fascist right rather than to the democratic left.

The Left was itself substantially to blame for this. The worst offenders were Marxian parties like the German or Austrian Social Democrats. First, they had a productivist, manufacturing-centered view, not merely of party policy but of social development itself. They believed agriculture was collapsing and peasants were about to become proletarian-hardly a message the agrarian population would warm to. Second, they developed a statist, centralized version of socialism. Nor did this appeal to rural populations, especially to peasants, who generally favored relatively decentralized democracies. Long before the working class began rejecting statist socialism across both west and east in the late twentieth century, peasants were turning their backs on it.

Working-class parties and unions were here making their most devastating mistake. For while the working class remained an un- armed minority of the population, it could not overturn its class opponents without rural allies. Yet its ideology usually blocked this alliance. In Scandinavia, Bohemia, and parts of France, how-




ever, special circumstances encouraged worker-agrarian alliances. First, those states had become national early on. Decentralizing movements among the rural population (e.g., in Bohemia below the level of the provincial diet) were feeble. Second, in Sweden, Denmark, and France, industrialization had not so clearly segregated an urban-industrial from a rural-agrarian sector. Industry and agriculture penetrated all households. In Sweden and Den- mark, this seems to have encouraged a diffuse notion of social citizenship that non-Marxian Socialists were able to hegemonize; in France, it encouraged an apparently quite different ideological factionalism. But in neither country did two segregated political ideologies emerge.

If peasants found no existing party to defend their interests, they formed their own party, as did American Populists (unsuccess- fully) and various Austro-Hungarian peasant groups (some successfully). Alternatively, more adept mainstream parties, such as Germany's Catholic Center, Sweden's Social Democrats (eventually), and rival French parties, realized the importance of peasant support, especially as suffrages widened, and modified their plat- forms to win it. Thus, peasants influenced national politics and state structuring.

Politics did not simply determine class struggle; we have not weighted economic versus political variables in some ultimate sense. Rather, outcomes were mutually determined by underlying similarities of class and sectoral interests that came under the impact of an essentially similar global commercialization of capitalism, interacting with very different political crystallizations of state regimes and party alliances.

Theories of modern stratification must be revised. Modem British class relations and political structures were based on an urban-industrial social structure. But in all other countries, agrarian classes remained significant in social stratification and political struggles. Agrarians, primarily small to medium-sized commercial farmers, constituted at least a third of the populations in the countries we have surveyed. More important, these rural groups were highly active both in the market economy and in politics. Peasants usually cast the swing vote, determining whether political outcomes went in overall leftist or rightist directions.

We have observed that previous work on agricultural classes, social stratification, and political behavior has concentrated on




economic variables. Its theories "relate types of agricultural enter- prises and property systems to the patterns of class relations in rural social life" (Stinchcombe I96I: 167). But by confining peasant and farmer political concerns to limited economic interests, this approach isolates agrarians from wider political struggles. By considering the role of state regimes, parties, sectors, religions, and regions as well as class, we have demonstrated a more fluid political relationship between agrarians and others, while expos- ing a complexity of early twentieth-century class relations missed by stratification theories based on industrial populations.

NOTES

I These are not the only conceivable patterns. For example, we have no case of a weak, old regime ranged against a decentralizing alliance, although Spain might approximate one (Malefakis 1970).

2 As we will demonstrate, agrarian politics contains substantial regional differences, reinforced in the U.S. by federalism. Though we are mindful of the disparities between agrarian conditions and farmer politics in different U.S. states, we concentrate here on national political movements. An adequate treatment of the distinctiveness of southern states, in particular, would take far more space than we have here. Not all U.S. farmers participated, or even had an interest, in the movements we identify.

3 These generalizations fit Norway less well than Denmark or Sweden. Nor- way's economy was more sectorally varied and its people more linguistically diverse, which encouraged regionalism, rural religious fundamentalism, and urban Marxian socialism. Only after 1930 did the DNA (Social Democrats) abandon revolutionary for reformist socialism, enabling them in 1935 to form a farmer-working-class government (Esping-Andersen 1985: 81).

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A Theory of Early Twentieth-Century Agrarian Politics

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